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Always there were questions about the kids—Cathy, 5½, Lori, 2, and John, 8 months. "Send me a closeup picture of you and the kids. Give me hope and something to live for." There were memories of courtship on the campus of Kansas State University, where John got a B.S. in business administration after graduating from little Tonganoxie (Kans.) high school. "You wrote about how you will never forget the day you came to me when we were in college and said you wanted to marry me. I was thinking of that same thing about the time you wrote the letter, Connie. Maybe there is such a thing as telepathy, eh?"
When she felt lowest, Connie McKone consoled herself by recalling the survival training that John got after he joined the Air Force and graduated from navigator and bombardier school in 1954. That tough course would be useful now. "I want to come home so badly," John wrote. "Kiss each of the children for me and pray God I will be home soon."
"Oh My . . ." Gail Olmstead, pregnant with her second child (the first: Karen, 2), spent the empty, endless weeks of waiting at her parents' home in Plainfield, N.J. It was hard to maintain her husband's faith that everything would work out, that they would be back together soon. The details of Bruce Olmstead's confinement were not encouraging: "I am kept alone in a cell but am not being abused." Prison, he wrote, "has pretty well shown me that I couldn't quite make it as a cloistered monk. I am given cigarettes, hon, and filters at that. But, oh my, how I long for a good old American cigarette . . . And I must confess that I wouldn't be averse to a martini."
Like McKone, Bruce Olmstead seemed to worry more about what his ordeal would mean to his family than what it would do to him. His own spirit, which he showed from the moment he joined the Air Force after graduating from Kenyon College in 1957, was more than enough to sustain him. Brought up in a devout Episcopal family, Olmstead made the most of a Catholic Bible surprisingly provided by his jailers. He read Scriptures and spent hours making up sermons. "Often in his letters home," said his brother, Dermatologist Brent Olmstead, "he'd include a little prayer he'd written especially for us." In his letters home, Bruce Olmstead always seemed to be trying to construct for himself some sort of image of his daughter's childhood that he was missing. "I try to picture her emptying the ashtrays. All I can see is her, with a surprised, half-whimpering look on her face, with half a cigarette in one hand and rubbing wet tobacco into her face with the other."
Enough Blame. For Gail Olmstead and Connie McKone, the toughest job of all was to follow Air Force advice to remain calm and quiet, not to make personal appeals to Khrushchev, not to complain to the press. It seemed to the two women that very little was being done for their husbands. Regularly, every two weeks, the U.S. State Department sent notes to the Soviet Foreign Office and asked that the two officers be released. Regularly, the notes drew evasive replies.